No more cash, even if you're in the Guardian

Having a feature about you in the Guardian does not allow you to charge more for your legal services, a high court judge has ruled. OK, I agree, perhaps his decision wasn't quite so blunt and Guardian-oriented, but it's not all that far from the truth. Here's what happened.

In 2001 the Sunday People published nude photographs of the renowned disc jockey Sara Cox, on honeymoon in the Seychelles, taken with a long lens camera. She and her husband sued, claiming breach of privacy, and eventually won compensation and the return of all photos and negatives.

Their solicitor was the redoubtable Keith Schilling, acting under a "no win, no fee" agreement.

The question then arose: how much should Schilling be entitled to charge for winning the case for Cox? A "costs judge", whose job it is to assess these things, decided that he should be paid £300 to £315 an hour. This did not please Schilling, who, in March, appealed to a high court judge, arguing that his time was worth £400 to £450 an hour.

In support of his claim, as Mr Justice Eady put in his judgment, just published, "reliance was placed on certain newspaper cuttings, purporting to show the unique qualities of the service offered by Mr Schilling".

Prominent among the cuttings was a full-page photograph in the Guardian in 2003 "with a caption including the description that he is 'probably the most feared lawyer in Britain'. Inside, there is a two-page feature about him headed 'The Silencer' and stating that he is 'one of the highest paid lawyers in Britain, a regular at film premieres and the first port of call for any celebrity having a spot of bother with the press ... the injunction king.' He is said to have 'world weary features and what appears to be expensively coloured hair'".

Alas, Mr Justice Eady was unmoved by these excellent references. After remarking that "it is difficult to see what a costs judge is supposed to do with such material," Eady managed a sly dig, that in the world of lawyers who advertised themselves, "... there is a danger that some people will begin to believe their own publicity". Appeal dismissed. Schilling will have to make do with £300 an hour.

I was amused that Lord Falconer, head of the Department for Constitutional Affairs, should have been so directly and publicly contradicted by his most junior minister, Vera Baird, over his interpretation of the notorious sentence on the child abuser Craig Sweeney.

I have never before heard radio's Any Questions? used as a forum for a panellist to tell the nation: "Don't listen to my boss. He knows nothing, and has got it all wrong."

She didn't put it that way, of course, but no other interpretation was possible when she proclaimed that the judge had erred in three separate ways - soon after Lord Falconer had been all over the media saying that the judge was absolutely right, but had been compelled to follow a rubbish law.

Anyway, all this proves a point I've been making for years, but which has been infinitely reinforced by the Criminal Justice Act 2003.

No one can now fully understand the collection of laws that govern sentencing and the criminal justice system - not the judges who pass sentence (many have told me so), not even the brainy judges of the court of appeal (a good number of whom have confessed their confusion to me), and certainly not the politicians. The solution is not more reform, as the government threatens, but simplification.